(Ad)venture Capital

Unlike Martin Amis's latest novel Lionel Asbo, with its raids on reality TV's bag of ticky-tack, John Lanchester’s novel Capital doesn’t need to compete with the cable box and its mind-grips. It already is TV, a blockbuster miniseries waiting to be made, with a whodunit hook of a plotline, a rich opportunity for multiracial casting, and the perfect sunset part for Maggie Smith as a dottering old dame named Petunia on whom death is about to lower the blinds. As newsy as Lionel Asbo but casting a wider dragnet, Capital incorporates the real-estate boom, the 2008 financial bust (which Lanchester explored earlier in his bestselling tutorial I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay), the graffiti exploits of street artist Banksy, and the Occupy movement into a perfect fireside reading that captures the Trollopean “way we live now” without putting on grand airs. Set mostly on mythical Pepys Road in south London, which survived the Nazi V2 rockets and slumbered for decades until reanimated by the post-millennium spike in housing prices (“As the houses had got more expensive, it was as if they had come alive, and had wishes and needs of their own”), Capital is a site-specific, cross-sectional ensemble piece akin to Jimmy McGovern’s British drama series The Street, the long-running soap Coronation Street, Ruth Rendall’s Portobello, and Zadie Smith’s NW; here, the avenue view takes on the precise, miniaturist clarity of a fabled toy village. The fuse sizzling through each chapter is lit by a series of anonymous postcards delivered at Pepys Road addresses bearing the warning threat “We Want What You Have,” accompanied by a photograph of the house. It’s at first shrugged off a a prank, a nuisance, perhaps some punk political gesture, but then the hostilities escalate from postcards to DVDs delivered in jiffy bags to online vilification to hate graffiti to property damage to possible terrorism.

A shadowy presence leaving voodoo messages that sow fear and suspicion among strangers and neighbors alike is a staple device (i.e., a venerable gimmick) of suspense procedurals from Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night to Fred Vargas’s The Chalk Circle Man, but Lanchester uses the mystery of the scare campaign as a MacGuffin to set his multiple character studies into conflicting motion. The aforementioned Petunia, a Polish laborer, a soccer star imported from Senegal, a Muslim shopkeeper and his family, a traffic warden originally from Zimbabwe whose martinet ticketing makes her the most loathed figure on Pepys Road, a prosperous banker whose wife spends money like Marie Antoinette’s personal shopper, the detective inspector assigned to find out who or what’s behind the Pepys Road bollocking--it’s a multinational unit of individualized characters whose crisscrossing maneuvers and ricochet encounters are conducted by Lanchester with a minimum of fuss and Dickensian string-pulling. Beneath the various plot shifts, scene changes, and slow-buildup set-pieces (comic highlight: the banker realizing with stunned incredulity that he’s not receiving the million-pound bonus he was expecting, feeling if he’s been struck by an iceberg), Lanchester maintains a cantering tempo in the prose that grounds the complications with a pulse beat of steady-as-she-goes. Such assurance is reassuring. You never worry that the novel is going to fumble before it reaches the end zone and incomplete its mission. So neatly assembled a BBC-ish drama entertainment is Capital that its underdog sympathies, its liberal humanism, are easy to overlook. On this merry-go-round it’s the minority characters, the refugees and recent arrivals, that get the raw jab of the stick, which they endure stoically, in part because they have no other choice. It’s either that or crumble inside. While Roger the now-broke banker tools off to begin his new downsized life (“hard times were moving in like a band of rain”), nursing hopes of a turnaround, Quentina, the loathed traffic warden of Pepys Road, finds herself limboed in indefinite internment, “a non-person in a non-place waiting her way through non-time.” For its soft, white natives, Britain remains forever home, no matter how badly they muck up; those of color are one misstep away from the recycle bin, always made excruciatingly aware of how replaceable they are.